OIOS PROBES UN’s INTERNATIONAL TRADE CENTRE IN SIERRA LEONE
A UN Investigations Department in New York at UN HQ, the OIOS, leaked, in February this year, an internal anti-corruption investigation concerning the International Trade Centre (ITC) Sierra Leone Country office that forewarned ITC staff in Freetown including Yared Befecadu and ITC employee Mr. Shiaka Kawa that persistent and pervasive corruption throughout the ITC’s West Africa Competitiveness Programme (WACOMP), threatened ITC’s interventions and existence in West Africa. The ITC agency’s employees, in turn tipped off their corrupt colleagues at a linked World Bank project and dozens of ITC GOSL client MDAs personnel within the corruption cartel architecture, were forewarned that the game was up.
Consequently, as a result of that reckless dynamic, two U.S. citizen consultants threatened by ITC employees, fled Sierra Leone and the family property of one, in Kenema was burnt down by the corrupt cartel employees or their hirelings inside the ITC and World Bank. According to a Fire Services report, the arson attack on the U.S. citizen’s family property was caused by a combustible substance poured over the house in which children inside the property fled the inferno minutes before it was gutted. UN documents, reveal the cartel based at the ITC and World Bank, had solicited $25000 bribes from a contracted corporation which the corporation had refused to pay the ITC and World Bank staff. Procedurally, by leaking the confidential investigation files including secret audio files of ITC and World Bank staff demanding bribes, the investigation was scuppered and the entire cartel architecture intra-ITC/WB, still operating.
The astounding UN managerial reasoning is that the UN procures and encourages donor funding as the EC EuropeAid/138778 or USA Windows 2 funding to the ITC based on the success of programmes and therefore UN investigators strive to conceal the operational reality of corruption practiced in their midst at the ITC and WB for existential or agency survival reasons. Programmes have to be successful to encourage further funding and final reports are sculpted by co-opted evaluators who ‘play the game’ for example WACOMP’s evaluation for the EU by Karsten Weitzenegger.
Our investigation reveals, the ITC and World Bank Sierra Leone offices are staffed by notorious local and other corrupt fraudster employees previously identified in State anti-corruption investigations, who have established a self-enrichment, far-reaching cartel membership that traverses all of the GOSL MDAs in any UN agency programme contact which involves a GOSL MDA. For example, ITC or World Bank program funds will be diverted to companies, individuals and indeed, MDA personnel cream off program funds which are then sanitized as legitimate programme expenditures within programmes as WACOMP, SCADeP, TFWA, etc in final project evaluations.